Mobile communication systems have evolved over the past ten years or so from the GSM System (Global System for Mobile Communications) to the 3G system and now include packet data communications as well as circuit switched communications. The third generation project partnership (3GPP) has now begun to develop a mobile communication system referred to as Long Term Evolution (LTE) in which a core network part has been evolved to form a more simplified architecture based on a merging of components of earlier mobile radio network architectures and a radio access interface which is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) on the downlink and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) on the uplink.
Human to human (H2H) communications can be defined generally as data which is transmitted by a human to another human or at least data that is transmitted for presentation to a human being. Although mobile communications systems have previously focused on H2H communications there is a desire to cater for communications to and/or from machines which are referred to generally as machine type communications (MTC). Machine to machine (M2M) communications are a form of MTC communications where both the transmitter and receiver of the communications are both machines. Machine initiated MTC communications can be characterised as communicating data which has been generated from a source automatically, for example in response to some other stimulus or event reporting some attribute of the machine or some monitored parameter or so-called smart metering. Thus whilst voice human communications can be characterised as being communications requiring a communications session of some minutes with data being generated in bursts of several milliseconds with pauses there between or video human communications can be characterised as streaming data at a substantially constant bit rate, MTC communications can generally be characterised as sporadically communicating relatively small quantities of data although it will be appreciated that there is also a wide variety of possible MTC communications.
As will be appreciated it is generally desirable to provide mobile communications which use a radio communications bandwidth and core network resources as efficiently as possible, and although this is true for all types of data communications, MTC communications can present a new challenge to the development of mobile communications systems.